Best Bread Pudding Recipes

Pain perdu (French toast) is my way to save day-old bread but today I added a twist to my plain recipe. I turned it into pain perdu cupcakes and flavored them with bananas and figs. To give them a unique flavoring, I used fennel seeds, which pair incredibly well with the ripe fruits.

I'm preparing for an upcoming food project these days (I'll tell you more about it soon) that requires focusing on bread, so we end up with loads of untouched baguettes. Given my aversion to waste, this dessert hits the spot. Pain perdu literally translates to "lost bread” and I can assure you that none of it was lost!

This recipe calls for all the usual suspects that are found in bread pudding, namely sugar, milk, fresh or dried fruits and some dry bread cubes. I made my apple raisin bread pudding using stale bread that has been sitting on the kitchen counter. The dryness of stale bread is actually an asset in preparing bread pudding, because the dry bread will soak up a good deal of flavor. If you buy a lot of bread and sometimes don't use all of it, this recipe might be helpful for you. It was amazing how fast these little mini loaves of bread pudding disappeared!

Bread pudding to me is a perfect breakfast food, similar to pain perdu, or French toast. I also often enjoy it for le goûter de 4 heures, which in English translates to "4 p.m. snack". As a child, this was my favorite time of the day! My childhood memory of a typical "4 heures" would be a piece of warm baguette with a piece of chocolate, an apple and chocolate milk. If you ask any French kid, that's pretty normal but it doesn't seem to be this way in America. The juice box and supermarket candy bar that most American kids eat (including my little sisters-in-law), definitely don't compare.

We had a family gathering.Made some All bread pudding recipes call for the same set of ingredients: dry bread, milk, cream, eggs and sugar. This particular version is both familiar and new at the same time. For the bread, I used panettone left-over from the holidays that got a little dry. I also added coconut cream to the traditional heavy cream to pump up the flavor.

We served the bread pudding at a large family gathering, alongside a deliciously decadent caramel-rum sauce. Check back tomorrow to get the recipe for the bread pudding sauce!